Introduction

Alternative PubMed interfaces refers to a range of alternate search tools and interfaces that can search PubMed - MEDLINE in such a way that newer information patterns or insights into the medical literature can be ascertained. Via a combination of data mining, linguistic analysis, statistical methodologies and semantic algorithms, a range of alternative PubMed interfaces provide librarians and researchers with new ways to examine the biomedical literature from unique perspectives. Interestingly, many of the sites listed below are frequently down, or inaccessible, so caution is advised. The National Library of Medicine (U.S.) encourages software developers to create innovative tools to search Medline. Commercial services such as Dialog and EBSCO - as well as academic libraries, bioinformatics organizations, pharmaceutical companies and software startups - lease copies of the PubMed database (seeleasing data) and build alternate interfaces to search it. For a different view of searching the biomedical literature, try some of the tools below. In 2016, the AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) sketched out the use of text-mining tools as an emerging methodology within a number of systematic review processes; they sought to provide information addressing pressing questions individuals and organizations face when considering utilizing text-mining tools.

an information extraction tool, FACTA+ was a winner in the National Library of Medicine’s software development challenge. The algorithms extract relationships from your query, searching in PubMed, PubMedCentral, TOXLINE, Biomed Central, NIH, FDA, and other agency grant proposals, as well as biomedical news sources

Most citations in PubMed are from MEDLINE, and MEDLINE records are indexed with (typically around 10 to 12) Medical Subject Headings. These MeSH headings include not only topic areas but geographic regions — around 15% of all indexed records are tagged with the name of a continent, country or city. Mapping MEDLINE searches your results against these goegraphical headings. Of course some articles might mention a country name in a title or abstract without a corresponding index term, so Mapping MEDLINE searches those fields by country name as well

"A free webtool that allows you to research and generate statistics on scientists, journals, and the biomedical literature itself. It is a live literature-summary interface, feeding directly off the current MEDLINE/PubMed database."

Quickcall: How Pubmed interprets query and the number of associated records.

Timeline: Timeline of the number of results from each year.

MeSHit: Gives the top 10 MeSH headings associated with a query.

Profile: Shows top 10: Authors, Journals, MeSH headings, Stared MeSH terms, number of papers published and human to animal ratios.

An extension of the work in Visualizing PubMed, Search Workbench allows you to examine, edit and visualize your PubMed searches. Perhaps most importantly, you can also directly compare searches to one another — facilitating the process of fine-tuning a search strategy.

From the website: "...When conducting a comprehensive search, it is critical to design a strategy that retrieves all potentially relevant articles. Experienced searchers know the power of using controlled vocabularies but also the frustration of not being able to pinpoint articles known to be relevant but missing from the initial retrieval set. Librarians have long analyzed Medical Subject Headings to design and refine searches. A MeSH analysis grid can help identify the problems in your search strategy by presenting the ways articles are indexed in the MEDLINE database in an easy-to-scan tabular format. Typically, each column in the grid represents an article, with identifying information of the article at the top of the column, such as the PMID, the author, and the year of publication. The MeSH terms are sorted and grouped alphabetically for ease of scanning. Librarians can then easily scan the grid and identify appropriate MesH terms, term variants, indexing consistency, and the reasons why some articles are retrieved and others are not. This inevitably leads to fresh iterations of the search strategy to include missing important terms. In addition to MeSH terms, author-assigned keywords, article titles, and abstracts can be included in the analysis grid..."

Other search engines try to find anything might be relevant, forcing you to spend hours (or more) weeding through long lists of results. The patent-pending technology recognizes key points authors make in each document so you can Find What Matters™ right away.

built from the ground up to address the unique needs of this technical literature